The effect of sanctions against Russia: “we have not even begun”

The latter one is working partly for them too (e.g., the procurement for the Kerch bridge), but primarily for buying the support of the regime’s most important pillars: the siloviki, the local elites (especially, but not only in Chechnya), the pensioners, and so on.30 Thus, in the case of cuts, the first hard choice that Putin and his close circle would have to make is between their own pockets an. [...] Above, we have demonstrated the importance of this rent for the RF’s budget and discussed the trade-off between austerity and deepening the recession that the economic authorities face when handling the consequences of the rent’s contraction, in the absence of both liquid assets to sell and access to international capital markets from which to borrow. [...] Therefore, the tougher, more decisive, and more credible the sanctions, the shorter the period of agony and the less likely the riskiest scenario of a massive rebellion akin to 1917 would take place. [...] In the absence of the unlikely discovery of a substitute of equal magnitude, in the long run, austerity it is the only option, and means cutting the rents, especially the ones stemming from the state (primarily – federal) budget. [...] Inozemtsev has suggested, they could agree to stop the war and surrender the prominent war criminals to the International Criminal Court (ICC) if the alternative looks disastrous to them – following the Serbian example.38 This, in turn, is likely to end up in more or less controllable dismantling of the vertical, resembling the meltdown of the Soviet Union in 1991.39 The risk of proliferation or u.